While webOS still has some loyal fans, it's now essentially dead on the market. Once viewed as the strongest competitor to Apple, Inc.'s (AAPL) iPhone, Palm's mismanagement led to its 2010 fire sale to HP. If Palm was in bad shape before the sale, it quickly found itself in an even worse position. HP refused to invest the capital necessary to make the webOS devices serious market entrants, squandering the strong mobile operating system that Palm had maintained and produced.

A spinoff of the Palm unit is a possible, but unlikely outcome. A new Palm, Inc. would likely lack the cash necessary to offer a competitive hardware lineup, and lack the influence necessary to attract third parties to a licensing-driven scheme, particularly in the packed smartphone market.

The most likely final outcome is a sale of webOS (or what's left of it) to a mobile hardware maker interested in using the OS on some of its devices. Samsung Electronics Comp., Ltd. (SEO 005930) already unequivocally stated that it had no interest in buying webOS. Thus the most likely bidders would seemingly be Taiwan's HTC Corp. (SEO:066570), Amazon, Inc. (AMZN), or Google Inc. (GOOG) (who could use parts of webOS, e.g. its slick multi-tasking interface to improve the Android operating system).

Package and parcel with the webOS deal would be the slick new Enyo javascript web app suite. That package was shown to run webOS apps on Apple's iPad, and should be a decent fit for virtually any modern mobile platform.

It's important, though, to remember that much of the talent on the webOS team has already left or been laid off. Thus if a third party takes on the platform, it will have significant rebuilding work to do, to restore the webOS team to full functionality.

The idea of every app needing to be programmed for a certain device seems to only live on with greedy programmers who realize that they will earn more if they convince people that they need to make a new one for each device instead of a web based one that is able to adapt to a new device with minor code changes. After all how many apps really need access to more functionality than that found in the browser?